Whoa. Today was a doozy.
12:30am – Son wakes me up and takes a long time to go back down.
4:30 – Son wakes up needing to pee.
5:45 – Alarm wakes me up but I go back to sleep. No morning pages yet again.
6:45 – Son wakes me up. I slept in way too late.
6:50 – Wake up daughter
7:00 – Morning routine
7:40 – Drop daughter off at school
8:00 – Drive to work (listen to music)
8:46 – Arrive at work (3 minutes after bell! Not good!)
9:45 – Drive to other campus / Start teaching
12:05 – Work through lunch
2:30 – School day over / Prep for tomorrow
3:00 – Leave work.
3:30 – Get Allergy shots / Grade papers while waiting for post shot check
4:20 – Pick up son
4:30 – Make smoothies and heat up left overs for kids / Make and eat dinner for me
5:15 – Pick up daughter
5:30 – PTA meeting (I ended up having to watch all the kids because the child care provided wasn’t there. It was super intense).
6:30 – Clean up child care room.
7:00 – Arrive home / Daughter’s homework
7:30 – Son’s bedtime
8:15 – Daughter’s bedtime
9:00 – Fall asleep in daughter’s room
10:00 – Husband wakes me up / Write this post
10:15 – Decide to wait on work and go to sleep.
Maybe you could drop the PTA?
It just seems like a lot of time when you’re already so squeezed for time with the kids at each end of a long day.
Is there no after school activities like swimming classes etc? I’m in New Zealand so I’m not sure.. I seem to spend a lot of time at swimming, skating, judo, ever since I lost my copy of the Idle Parent 😋
I wouldn’t feel comfortable dropping the PTA at this point. I made a commitment and it’s for my daughter’s school and I take that seriously. I never renege on my commitments unless absolutely necessary.
As for extracurricular activities, we don’t have our kids in any currently. My daughter has sensory processing differences and just wants to be home when she doesn’t have to be other places. Generally she doesn’t even want to have play dates or go somewhere fun if she could be home, so putting her in a situation where she has to sit still for periods and then follow directions isn’t something she ultimately wants. She does love swimming lessons but they are very expensive here and we’re taking a break from them right now. (And she has expressed interest in karate and ballet, but whenever we press her to decide if she really wants to do them, she says no thank you.)
My son really likes soccer, and when he turns three and can be in the next class up we’ll enroll him again, but that is on Saturdays. I generally try to avoid week day activities. It just seems like a lot after a long day in school and aftercare. I figure they have a lot of years to be in activities; we don’t have to start when they are six and two.
Simply grim and I am not seeing any easy low-hanging fruit.
Marriages are all tricky and full of difficult compromises… I presume you have very solid reasons for not splitting the early wake-ups and middle of the night wakings differently with your husband. AND, I know even if ‘the other parent’ had gotten up I would have been awake anyway; so, I am not sure that would actually improve your rest.
Sending good wishes!
Yeah, it’s hard to split those up because both our children (very vocally) prefer me in the nights and mornings, so even if I don’t go in there, I’ll be awake hearing them scream and yell. And it will take MUCH longer for my husband to quiet them down, so it makes more sense (or at least is the path of least resistance) for me to go in. I’m sure if we were more consistent about having my husband go in for a few months, they would be okay with it, but those few months would be absolutely brutal. Also, I am really good at falling back asleep after getting up, but my husband struggles. So that is another reason I do it, because I can almost always go back to sleep almost immediately, but it can take him up to an hour.
Please tell me you can sleep in or take a nap at least one weekend day.
Not really, not now. My son is not happy when my husband goes into his room in the morning, so even if my husband went in there, my son’s screaming would wake me up. So now is not the season of sleeping in. But that’s okay. It will come.
I’ve gotten good at tuning out my son’s cries for me in the morning and falling back to sleep. Well, maybe one day soon you can spend a night at your parents to sleep in.
My house is very small, and our room doesn’t have one wall (it’s just a Japanese shade that separates our room from the living room) so we can hear EVERYTHING in there. It’s unfortunate, and I can’t wait until that hypothetical day when we can move into our downstairs unit and be a whole floor away from our kids! 😉
heavens! what a tight schedule! Curious as to what made you decide for PTA now ? Admirable but you’re already sounding frazzled to the hilt with two little kids and dashing between schools and next to no downtime.
weekend activities sound sensible given the kids have such long days with care and school.
I volunteered to be in the PTA in March and didn’t find out about my crazy schedule until late May. If I had known I’d be traveling between schools and have 250+ students, I probably would have said no to the PTA. By the time I knew, I had already been elected to the position of Vice-President.